Otto Glockel and School Reform in Austria
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1978/No. 35 by Dennison I. Rusinow Otto Glckel and School Reform Europe [DIR-3-'78] in Austria Otto G16ckel (1874-1935) lives on as both a age 10 to age 14 an educational selection process positive and a negative totem in contemporary that virtually precludes later changes in educa- Austrian educational politics. For Socialist school tional specialization, career type, and social officials and other advocates of the school reforms status. No one has been willing to dispute the that are currently under discussion, he is their common sense and empirically demonstrable frequently cited progenitor, the progressive peda- contention that age ten is too young to know with gogue and politician whose ideas and intentions any certainty how intelligent or talented a person still largely valid and still in some essentials will be or the precise direction that his or her unfulfilledmade "Red Vienna" in the 1920s a talents and inclinations may take, but changes in place of pilgrimage for hundreds of other pro- the system that would delay the moment of gressive pedagogues from Europe, Asia, and the decisionby extending general, uniform school- Americas. When his name means something to ing from the first four to the first eight years and most other Austrians, which is less often, it stands by making it easier to shift from one type to instead for an energetically anticlerical Austro- another at any time after the fourth gradeare as Marxist who advocated some good ideas (mostly controversial in 1978 as they were in the 1890s, long since accepted) but whose other reforms, still when G1/Sckel and others first proposed that it alive and dangerous in the aspirations of ideo- should be done. logical successors in influential positions, would lead to educational and social disaster. The G16ckel himself also and predictably main- consequences, in this view, would include an edu- tained that resistance to this and other aspects of cation as poor as that ofthe United States, where a his reform program was a matter of stubborn con- high school diploma is no assurance of even servatism. For him, however, there was nothing simple literacy, the eclipse of religion and the perverse or "cultural" about it. From a Marxist family, and a socially and individually destructive point of view, which was for G16ckel a confirma- kind of leveling and stereotyping (Vermassung)in tion of his own early experiences as pupil and which ignorance and the ignorant masses reign teacher, defense of the existing school and talent, background, and enterprise are un- systemindeed, as we shall see, some of G16ckel's rewarded. opponents actually wished to turn the clock back to an even earlier systemwas a logical and self- For the outside layman, at least some of serving position for classes that had an interest in G1/Sckel's still unimplemented reforms seem so preserving their own and the Catholic Church's obviously desirable, both socially and individually political and social hegemony in defiance of a and from all ideological positions represented in changing world; "educational privilege" (Bil- today's Austria, that effective opposition for more dungsprivileg) is essential to the maintenance of than 60 years appears to be a symbol of peculiarly other privileges because education equals perverse cultural conservatism. This is particu- power. Fellow-Socialists among G16ckel's larly true of measures that would postpone from present-day followers tend to agree that this was 2/DIR-3-'78 and is still the case. In the next breath, however, system created by the R eichsvolksschulgesetz they are willing to agree that many and perhaps (Imperial Public School Law) of 1869, modified in most of their own party's working- and middle- practice and in amendments to that legislation class voters are also in the ranks of the opposition under conservative administrations in later to comprehensive schooling for 10- to 14-year-olds years,a The 1869 law was in turn the work of the and some other features of the reform program. Liberal ministry reluctantly appointed by Unless this is taken as a sign that these voters are Emperor Francis Joseph after a series of humilia- not "class conscious," which cannot be argued by tions and defeats, culminating in the Austro- anyone who knows them or recent Austrian his- Prussian War of 1866 and the Austro-Hungarian tory, it is surely a sign that the equation is more Compromise of 1867, which had demonstrated complex (i.e., that more class interests and cleri- the ineffectiveness of post-1849 neo-absolutism calism versus anticlericalism are in play). and the inadequacies of the Empire's army, economy, and schools. The Liberal ministry's The story of the life and times of Otto G16ckel mandate was to modernize in all these fields, and his reforms is a study of a complex set of re- initially to prepare the country for a war of revenge lationships between collective and individual against Prussia that would restore the House of political and cultural values and the educational Hapsburg as the pre-eminent German power and system in a period of dramatic social and political later merely to preserve it as at least a semblance change, stresses on both sets of values, and of a Great Power. political polarization along starkly ideological lines. In this context a movement for school The pattern, which a later generation might call reform that was eclectic in its inspiration and The Sputnik Principle, is familiar: the educa- aspirationssometimes apolitically pedagogical tional reforms of the late 1860s were undertaken and sometimes highly political and ideological as a result and under the influence of a traumatic became associated in self- and popular awareness experience that had made it apparent that others with Austro-Marxist Social Democracy as one of were more "modern" and thereby efficient and Austria's three political camps, invoking reflexive threatening. In this case the sputnik orbited by the as well as reasoned opposition by the other two, Prussians was an unexpected, quick, and decisive respectively Roman Catholic clericalist and military victory that had revealed superior mili- quondam-liberal German nationalist. Then, for tary technology (especially the Prussians' breech- 11 traumatic years, the Socialist camp with which loading "needle gun" that enabled their infantry these ideas were identified was eliminated from to reload in a prone position), superior strategy the political stage under successive dictatorships (suggesting better trained staff officers), and more by the other two. As a further and subsequent competent soldiery (suggesting more appropriate complication, while the reformers believed basic education, including indoctrination in (probably rightly) that their program corre- patriotic values). The lessons for Austrian edu- sponded and was responsive to the values and ex- cation seemed obvious and an appropriate recipe pectations of most supporters of their camp and was at hand--doubly appropriate because it of the majority of the population, the duration of seemed to echo Prussian school reforms intro- the struggle and intervening events now appear duced, at least on paper,4 since the 1840sin the to have led to some changes in those values and shape of the school system that these same expectations. As a result, there is today a latent Austrian German Liberals had urged and abor- conflict, generally but not always unrecognized tively promulgated during the revolution of 1848. by the reformers, between some aspects of what they and G1/Sckel had in mind and what the in- tended beneficiaries of their reforms now think As a first step, through legislation adopted in they want. 1868, the Liberal ministry had denounced the Concordat of 1855, separated school and church The Reformers' Inheritance once again, recreated a Ministry of Education, The school years ofthe last decades ofthe Haps- and replaced ecclesiastical school supervision burg Monarchy in the provinces that became the with a hierarchy of elected school boards. With Austrian Republic after 1918 was the school the ground thus cleared, the Imperial Public DI R-3-'78/3 School Law extended compulsory schooling from Austria todaywas there a compromise with the six to eight years and created eight-year public Austrian Conservatives and clergy and with the elementary schoolsto be called Volksschulen Pope. The latter had already protested the rather than Trivialschulen, a change with sym- renewed separation of church and school and bolic importanceas nondenominational and other related Liberal measures in a Secret Con- basically secular schools to be attended by pupils sistory on June 22, 1868, and in terms that G16ckel of all faiths, an aspect still contested by G16ckel's was to maintain were still the views of the opponents in the First Republic. It also urged the Christian Social Party and many Austrian establishment, with local funding, of far more Catholics in the twentieth century: three-year Burgerschulen, a type in existence on a small scale since 1774 as an alternative, more in- A truly atrocious act was passed as a constitu- tensive form of compulsory schooling for grades tional law by the Austrian government. By this law six to eight, with teachers specialized in individual unconditionalfreedom ofall opinion, ofthe press, subjects in place of the Volksschule's general of belief of conscience and of instruction was classroom teachers. In all these schools at the established; citizens of each and every creed are compulsory level the curriculum was revised, in- permitted to set up institutionsfor instruction and troducing more technical and "modern" subject education; all sorts of religious communities, of matter (called Realien) in addition to the three Rs whatsoever kind, are now regarded as equal and and religion. are recognized by the state...Impelled by our responsibilityfor the Church, which the Lord has Through these measures the 1869 law created a laid upon us, we raise our apostolic voice in this unitary, general, and public (state) elementary gathering and we condemn the said laws in school open to all classes and faiths.